Calvin Robinson’s Invitation To Speak At Christian Conference Rescinded
Fr. Calvin Robinson will no longer be speaking at Clear Truth Media’s upcoming Dangerous Friends conference after organizers rescinded the invitation over the emergence of incompatible beliefs regarding the nature and mission of the conference.
Robinson is the rector of St Paul’s Anglican Catholic Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is part of the Anglican Catholic Church. Known primarily as a conservative co-belligerent who has valiantly and courageously been fighting leftism and progressivism in the UK, he attracted some prominence and closer vetting within the Reformed world in recent months after being tapped to appear in Joel Webbon’s upcoming Christ is King: How to Defeat Trashworld! conference, and has recently demonstrated a predilection for calling John Calvin a heretic, attacking the Protestant Reformation, and saying things like:
Robinson shared the news of his removal on X:
Commenting on his removal from the Dangerous Friends conference, which includes other speakers like Jamie Bambrick, Rosaria Butterfield, Steve Deace, Michael Foster, Seth Gruber and Steven Whitlow, Michael Foster explains:
We call what we are doing post-denominationalism. This is not ecumenism but instead unity within the evangelical church. This is not about compromising core convictions as much as it is choosing to unify around even deeper convictions.”
ClearTruth Media (CTM) is about building unity within the evangelical Protestant world. You have labeled a significant portion of this world as heretical, after which we discovered that you are part of the Nordic Catholic Church. This was all news to us.
While we are thankful for your courage and firm stance in many areas, you ultimately fall outside the particular mission of ClearTruth. We’ll continue support you wherever we can.
He later added:
I like many of Fr. Robinson’s takes, including his views on Israel. The issue lies in his own words and theological positions, which align more closely with Rome than with Evangelical Protestantism. And this wasn’t unearthed from years-old tweets or private conversations. It was his very public posts—posts that included calling John Calvin a heretic, attacking the Reformation, and advocating praying to Mary.
This brought into focus that Fr. Robinson wasn’t a good fit for an explicitly Protestant Evangelical conference.
Should we have done better vetting on Fr. Robinson? Absolutely. We assumed he leaned more Evangelical Anglican than Evangelical Catholic. Lesson learned. We still appreciate much of his work and believe he’d be a worthy speaker in many other forums. We had zero desire to grandstand about this.
We weren’t planning to make a public announcement (just to attendees in case they were coming for him). However, he posted about it just minutes after we informed him that this was an explicitly Protestant Evangelical conference.
We told him we had made a mistake in inviting him and apologized (as in asking for his forgiveness) for not doing better research before inviting him. That’s the whole thing.